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Playing Hardball With Secrets

For more than two years, Senate Republicans have dragged out an investigation into how the Bush administration came to use bogus intelligence on Iraq to justify a war. A year ago, Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it "a monumental waste of time" to consider whether the White House manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, the evidence has steadily mounted that President Bush and his team not only did that before the war, but kept right on doing it after the invasion. The most recent additions to this pile came yesterday, in reports by The New York Sun, The National Journal and other news organizations on documents from the case against Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney who is charged with lying about the unmasking of Valerie Wilson, a covert C.I.A. agent.

According to these papers, Mr. Libby testified that President Bush authorized him to tell reporters about classified intelligence on Iraq as part of an effort to discredit Mrs. Wilson's husband, Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat who had cast doubt on the claim that Iraq tried to acquire uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger. The National Journal reported that Mr. Libby has also said that Mr. Cheney authorized him to leak classified information before the invasion to make the case for war.

Mr. Wilson was sent by the administration to Niger to check out the report that Iraq tried to buy uranium in the late 1990's. He concluded that it was bogus and said so in a Times Op-Ed article in July 2003. In response, the administration leaked word that Mr. Wilson's wife was a C.I.A. agent.

We have seen no evidence that Mr. Bush authorized the outing of Mrs. Wilson. But at the least, revealing selected bits of intelligence, including information that officials may well have known to be false, seems like a serious abuse of power. It's not even clear that Mr. Bush can legally declassify intelligence at whim.

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We don't know for certain whether Mr. Wilson's conclusions got to Mr. Bush before the war. But we do know that they were omitted from the sanitized intelligence report presented to Congress and later to the public.

The National Journal reported that George Tenet, then director of central intelligence, told prosecutors that the C.I.A. reviewed the uranium story at Mr. Cheney's behest. He said the C.I.A. concluded there was no evidence to support it. The National Journal said Mr. Tenet reported this to Mr. Cheney and other officials, but the vice president continued to peddle the Niger fairy tale to the public.

The intelligence report on Iraq, prepared in late 2002, has now been largely declassified. But the White House has kept secret a one-page summary prepared for Mr. Bush. According to The National Journal, that document said the State Department and the Energy Department had concluded that it also was not true that Iraq bought aluminum tubes to enrich uranium. During his State of the Union address in 2003, Mr. Bush said flatly that it was true.

Obviously, this is not a waste of time, monumental or otherwise. It is vital that the Senate keep its word and publish a thorough accounting of how the intelligence on Iraq was presented to the world.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on April 7, 2006, on Page A00024 of the National edition with the headline: Playing Hardball With Secrets. Today's Paper|Subscribe